“The plan was simple: Build a laundry and staff it with locals and a few of their own.”

A former British SAS officer describes methods utilized to collect and target the IRA, PIRA [Provisional Irish Republican Army], Gerry Adams and their sympathizers:

The plan was simple: Build a laundry and staff it with locals and a few of their own. The laundry would then send out “color coded” special discount tickets, to the effect of “get two loads for the price of one,” etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was coded.

While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry cleaned, it had one additional cycle — every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue. The analyzer was disguised as just another piece of the laundry equipment; good OPSEC [operational security]. Within a few weeks, multiple positives had shown up, indicating the ingredients of bomb residue, and intelligence had determined which areas of the city were involved. To narrow their target list, [the laundry] simply sent out more specific coupons [numbered] to all houses in the area, and before long they had good addresses. After confirming addresses, authorities with the SAS teams swooped down on the multiple homes and arrested multiple personnel and confiscated numerous assembled bombs, weapons and ingredients. During the entire operation, no one was injured or killed.

By the way, the gentleman also told the story of how [the British] also bugged every new car going into Northern Ireland, and thus knew everything [Sinn Fein leader] Gerry Adams was discussing. They did this because Adams always conducted mobile meetings and always used new cars.

- Washington Post: Link.

Via New Shelton Wet/Dry: Link.

“That sound you hear? It’s the Bill of Rights being torn in half. Talk about losing the war on terror. Who needs external forces threatening your way of life when your elected lawmakers are doing such a good job of it?”
- Cory Doctorow

Senate Approves Bill to Broaden Wiretap Powers

The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a major expansion of the government’s surveillance powers, handing President Bush one more victory in a series of hard-fought clashes with Democrats over national security issues.

The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that Mr. Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program

- Eric Lichtblau, NY Times (July 10, 2008): Link.

Slashdot reports: Senate Passes Telecom Immunity Bill.

And yes — Barack Obama voted for it.

“Anyone is a potential target.”
- Julian Sanchez

The award for the most bald-faced lie on the House floor Friday, however, goes to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who insisted that the bill “does not allow warrantless surveillance of Americans.” She is wrong. It does.

… The bill … allows the government to conduct “vacuum cleaner” surveillance — sweeping up international traffic willy-nilly — then filter it for anything that looks interesting. Indeed, many believe that licensing such surveillance is precisely the point of this legislation. If so, “warrantless surveillance of Americans” could well become routine, whether or not they are the formal “targets” of eavesdropping.

- Julian Sanchez @ American Prospect (June 25, 2008): Link.

Via Boing Boing: Link.

See also Obama’s support for the FISA “compromise”.

Wikipedia: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

“If anyone expects President Obama to roll back Bush’s illegally-gained dictator powers, they are smoking rope.”
- Mark Frauenfelder

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald reports:

It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this “compromise” bill is the telecom amnesty part. It’s true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill’s expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.

- Glenn Greenwald @ Salon: Link.

From the comments:

What really rubbed me the wrong way was how Obama in his statement says essentially trust me with these powers, I’ll use them responsibly.

- Hume’s Ghost: Link.

Via Boing Boing: Link.

Speaking of Barack Obama:

“Obama’s campaign, which could spend as much as $500 million ….”

Breaking an earlier vow, Senator Barack Obama announced that he will opt out of the public campaign-finance system, in order to be able to spend unlimited amounts of money in the last two months of his presidential campaign, rather than merely $84 million, the amount to which Senator John McCain will be limited under public-funding laws. “It’ll be like George Steinbrenner’s Yankees in the 90s,” Democratic consultant Chris Lehane said of Obama’s campaign, which could spend as much as $500 million, “against the 90s Kansas City Royals.”

- Harper’s Weekly Review: Link.

Via Boing Boing: Link.

“During my lifetime, there has been a sea change in the way that politically active Americans view their relationship with government.”
- Studs Terkel

Earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the White House agreed to allow the executive branch to conduct dragnet interceptions of the electronic communications of people in the United States. They also agreed to “immunize” American telephone companies from lawsuits charging that after 9/11 some companies collaborated with the government to violate the Constitution and existing federal law. I am a plaintiff in one of those lawsuits, and I hope Congress thinks carefully before denying me, and millions of other Americans, our day in court.

- Studs Terkel @ The New York Times: link.

Via Kevin’s Security Scrapbook: link.

Via Boing Boing: “Interesting story about the Gulfstream II jet filled with 3.7 tons of cocaine that crashed in the Yucatan a couple of weeks ago. According to the Austin American Statesman, this plane has previously flown to Guantanamo Bay, which has a highly restricted airspace. Mad Cow Morning News visited the owners of the plane, ‘Donna Blue Aircraft Inc’ of Coconut Beach FL., and discovered that it’s an “empty office suite with a blank sign out front.”"

Some news reports have linked the plane to the transport of terrorist suspects to the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, but those reports cite logs that indicate only that the plane flew twice between Washington and Guantánamo and once between Oxford, Conn., and Guantánamo.

No terrorist suspects are known to have been transferred to Guantánamo directly from the United States.

The jet, with the tail number N987SA, changed hands twice in recent weeks. But how it ended up in the hands of suspected drug traffickers remains a mystery.

The Mexican attorney general’s office said the blue and white Gulfstream II crashed Monday in a remote jungle area on the Yucatán Peninsula. Authorities seized 132 bags of cocaine weighing four tons.

- Daniel Hopsicker, Oct 08, 2007: Link.

USA Today: “Plane crash in Mexico involved Colombian cocaine”: Link.

Fort Worth Star Telegram: “Crashed plane traced to drug kingpin”: Link.

“Virtually all key positions in Russian political life — in government and the economy — are controlled by the so-called “siloviki,” a blanket term to describe the network of former and current state-security officers with personal ties to the Soviet-era KGB and its successor agencies. “

The unexpected replacement of former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov by former Federal Financial Monitoring Service Director Viktor Zubkov is the latest consolidation of this group’s grip on power in Russia. Although Zubkov is not an intelligence officer by background, he has become one de facto during his years at the Financial Monitoring Service, and he has intimate knowledge of where the country’s legal and illegal assets are to be found.

Never in Russian or Soviet history has the political and economic influence of the security organs been as widespread as it is now.

The core of the siloviki group, led by former KGB officer and Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Vladimir Putin himself, comprises about 6,000 security-service alumni who entered the corridors of power during Putin’s first term. Now, as Putin’s second term winds down, their clout is virtually unassailable.

- Victor Yasmann, September 17, 2007 (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). Link.

“Russia’s Espiocrats”

“The plutocrats have been tamed, and replaced by a vast horde of spies. Much as this ominous prospect gives me pause, I have to think that maybe the siloviki are an *improvement* over the former semibankyrshina. Those moguls were a deeply unpleasant lot, and think what you may of Putin’s spy petrocracy with its giant bombs, oil blackmail and hideously poisoned dissidents, he is hugely popular with the general Russian population. ”

- Bruce Sterling @ Wired: Link.

“Ex-spook cult now running most of Russian politics”

“Russian political life has been usurped by “siloviki” — ex-spies — who have apparently seized power from the small network of hyper-rich plutocratic “bankers” who rose to power after the Wall came down. The siloviki are a tight mafiyeh whose methods include high-profile international assassination of defectors (the assassins walk free and then run for high office).

- Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing: Link.

“What motivates these so-called siloviki? “

In part, the wish for revenge on those who challenged them in the early 1990s, especially after the abortive KGB coup of August 1991. Greed may be the most powerful motive: some Kremlin insiders have hugely enriched themselves in the past decade, and corruption may be worse even than in the later Yeltsin years. But the new elite also has an ideology of sorts. They see the break-up of the Soviet Union as, in Mr Putin’s words, the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Capitalising on a widespread sense that Russia has been humiliated, they want to create as mighty a state as the Soviet Union once was. They see the West as a foe bent on stopping them.

- The Economist: Aug 23rd 2007 Link.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and His Style of Democracy”

In his first decade as a KGB agent, Putin’s job was to help prevent change. In 1985, only months before Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in power and started to advocate glasnost and perestroika, Putin was assigned to the Soviet Union’s hardline ally East Germany. True, it was not “exile”; but psychologically, Putin’s isolation in Dresden may have been experienced as emigration. Like a true emigrant, he kept his home alive, sweet and unchanged, in his heart: the Soviet rodina, the place of his youth, his parents - and his tongue.

While his generation personally experienced the erosion of Soviet power, Putin spent the Gorbachev years in an East German time-bubble, isolated both from a Russian society in transition and (as a KGB bureaucrat) from his crumbling host country as well. He missed the moments of awakening, the years full of hope as the Soviet empire crumbled, when millions took to the streets and democracy was a dream. It was only after the fall of Soviet power that he returned from Germany to his native St Petersburg.

To this day, Putin seems to be nostalgic for the pre-Gorbachev USSR - like the people of a decade older than him, who have been unable to make the transition. He has even reinstated some of its insignia, such as the Soviet anthem and the red banner for the military. And his team consists mostly of so-called siloviki, former Soviet military and security-apparatus officers who also speak the language of the past.

- Vichar Bhatt: Link.

“Siloviki Versus Oligarchy”

Russia today is ruled by Vladimir Putin’s siloviki, former K.G.B. men and military officers who have the nation by the throat. That power-hungry mafia (the Russian word is rooted in “power”) brooks no opposition from either the small band of democratic reformers or the political leftovers from the Yeltsin regime.

Only one power center posed a threat to the siloviki’s domination of Russian life. This was the group of oligarchs, who became the super-rich by ripping off the old Soviet Union’s natural resources when Communism collapsed.

The K.G.B.’s Putin came to power by making a deal: we of the siloviki run the country, and you oligarchs can keep your ill-gotten gains — provided you cut us in on some of the money and stay out of politics.

- William Safire @ New York Times, November 5, 2003: Link.

“Silovik (силови́к, plural: siloviks or siloviki, силовики́, from a Russian word for power)”

“[A] Russian politician from the old security or military services, often the KGB and military officers or other security services who came into power in the terms of Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin.

Opinions concerning siloviki in Russia are polarized. Some argue that the siloviki have Russia by the throat and threaten the fragile democracy; their power is immense, and they tend to favor a statist ideology at the expense of individual rights and freedoms.

Another point of view in Russia is that the siloviki are an appropriate counterweight to the Russian oligarchs, who might otherwise loot Russia and subvert its government.

- Wikipedia: Link.

From the White House web site, July 17, 2007:

Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as amended (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.)(IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.)(NEA), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,

I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, find that, due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, and expanded in Executive Order 13315 of August 28, 2003, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13350 of July 29, 2004, and Executive Order 13364 of November 29, 2004. I hereby order:

(more…)

“The appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs could not sue because they can’t prove they were affected by the program, and at the same time, ruled that details about the program, including who was targeted, are state secrets.”

A U.S. appeals court has ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit against the U.S. National Security Agency for a wiretapping program because it said the plaintiffs haven’t been hurt by the agency’s actions.

A divided three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled today that the lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of journalists, lawyers and academics, be sent back to a district court judge to be dismissed.

… In January [2007], the closed-door U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorized the U.S. government to wiretap phone and Internet communications involving suspected terrorists, and the court-approved program replaced the NSA program.

… The appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs could not sue because they can’t prove they were affected by the program, and at the same time, ruled that details about the program, including who was targeted, are state secrets.

[Computerworld]

Via SlashDot.

See also Kafkaesque.

Wiretapping: the power of aggregate data

… Snooping on just my phone calls, no whoop. However they have the computer power to snoop on everyones calls simultaneously, aggregate the data, look for patterns, and it is so secret they 1) can’t document abuses 2) can’t discipline anyone who abuses it.

eg: if 1000 people call in to the brokers to sell their Haliburton stock at the same time, a flag might instantly pop up on the VP’s computer, and automatically sell his stock first. Knowing one persons calls to trade a stock, meaningless, knowing a 1000 insiders did simultaneously, priceless.

Japan was accused of doing stuff like this back in the 70’s. eg: The phone Company would automatically take fax’s sent or received out of country, and copy them to any interested company’s, “in the nations best interest”. So if a American executive in japan faxed out a private bid for a contract to his home office, that fax would get to the Japanese business also bidding…

[Dare nMc: SlashDot]

“This is a guy who ran essentially the extraordinary rendition program, now is working as the vice chairman of Blackwater and starting his own private intelligence company. “

Interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

JEREMY SCAHILL: Among the most prominent, perhaps the biggest power player in Blackwater’s arsenal, is J. Cofer Black, who is a thirty-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, began his career in the 1970s in Africa, as the US — well, some would say supported the apartheid regime, others would say did nothing to stop it. So Cofer Black was one of the key CIA people in Africa throughout the ’70s and ’80s. And he arrived in Sudan in the early 1990s, and he came under diplomatic cover. As a sort of diplomat, he was there, but he actually was CIA.

And as Black was there, a young Saudi billionaire named Osama bin Laden was building up his international network. And by the time Black would leave Sudan a few years later, the CIA would refer to it as the Ford Foundation of Islamic terrorism. And so, Cofer Black and Osama bin Laden are both operating simultaneously in Khartoum in Sudan in the 1990s.

And Black would go on then to serve in Latin America, and just before 9/11 he was tapped to head up the CIA’s counterterrorism center.

AMY GOODMAN: Cofer Black is now part of a new Blackwater effort, a new company called Total Intelligence Solutions.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. This is really the next sort of generation of privatization, is the privatization of intelligence. And they’re marketing their services to Fortune 500 companies. And so, it’s not just Cofer Black. It’s another CIA guy who went on to work at Blackwater, Robert Richer, who was a Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA. So those two are really the sort of leaders behind this new initiative.

But, really, the man behind all of it is Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater. He’s rapidly buying up, for instance, a think tank, the Terrorism Research Center, and other intelligence entities and sort of cobbling them together. Blackwater’s big push now is not just for government contracts, but it’s also for corporate contracts. And so, it’s part of this radical privatization agenda. And to have a man heading this who told Congress openly, “There was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off” — this is a guy who ran essentially the extraordinary rendition program, now is working as the vice chairman of Blackwater and starting his own private intelligence company.

[Democracy Now]

Revolving Door: from the Pentagon to Blackwater

Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General, who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater during much of the “war on terror”–something he stood accused of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz’s tenure, powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had “quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations” of senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire, Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.

[Jeremy Scahill: The Nation]

“The lawyers representing the families of four American Blackwater contractors killed in Fallujah make the case that the company’s executives are suing the families to keep them quiet and to avoid any accountability.”

… The surviving family members looked to Blackwater for answers as to how and why their loved ones died. Blackwater not only refused to give the grieving families any information, but also callously stated that they would need to sue Blackwater to get it. Left with no alternative, in January 2005, the families filed suit against Blackwater, which is owned by the wealthy and politically-connected Erik Prince.

Blackwater … initially hired Fred F. Fielding, who is currently counsel to the President of the United States. It then hired Joseph E. Schmitz as its in-house counsel, who was formerly the Inspector General at the Pentagon. More recently, Blackwater employed Kenneth Starr, famed prosecutor in the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, to oppose the families. To add additional muscle, Blackwater hired Cofer Black, who was the Director of the CIA Counter- Terrorist Center.

… The families claim that Blackwater is attempting to cover up its incompetence, its cutting of corners in favor of higher profits, and its over billing to the government.

… Blackwater also stonewalled the families concerning any information about how the men were killed.

… Blackwater [is] suing the families for $10 million …. Blackwater has also threatened to hold the administrator of the estates personally liable to scare him into abandoning his position, and has threatened the families’ attorneys as well.

… Blackwater’s lawsuit now seeks to gag the family members from even speaking about the incident or about Blackwater’s involvement in the deaths. This is a direct attack to their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

[Daniel J. Callahan and Marc P. Miles: AlterNet]

Via Giant Monster.

Private undercover team exposes nationwide network of radical, anti-U.S. Islamic centers

“Our initial investigation has concluded there are between 400 to 500 radical Islamic centers in the U.S.,” said David Gaubatz, the director of counterintelligence and counterterrorism for the Society of Americans for National Existence. “In those places, they preach an extreme version of Islam that says America and the West is the enemy. They espouse violence, hatred and the need for terrorism.”

Gaubatz is a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who now works for the Mapping Shari’a in America Project (www.mappingsharia.com), which is supported by SANE, a national non-profit group devoted to investigating the 2,300 Islamic centers in the U.S. for extremist activity.

Gaubatz and his investigators are currently active and will soon form a team of about 12. They pose as people interested in converting to Islam or who are current Muslims. Their goal is to infiltrate mosques and Muslim centers. Recently, he and his team penetrated the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, located in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

Sporting a beard and Muslim dress, Gaubatz said he went on May 18 to the center, pretending to be an American interested in becoming a convert to Islam. He discovered the center espoused terrorism and jihad against America.

“They are teaching what they call Jihad Qital, which means physical jihad,” Gaubatz said. “They’re teaching violence and hatred of the United States.”

… Gaubatz maintains that he and his team of field workers at the Mapping Shari’a in America Project are not only focusing on major metropolitan areas. Although there is plenty of Islamist activity in cities such as Detroit, Dearborn, Michigan and Washington, he says radical Muslims are also establishing education and religious centers in small towns.

“They’re branching out and teaching the Jihadist ideology in small towns across America, especially in rural areas in places like Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina,” Gaubatz said.

… Gaubatz says that his investigative team is composed of individuals of various faiths, whose goal is to protect the American homeland from Islamic extremism.

“We have a team consisting of Christians, Jews and Muslims—there are several Muslims, in fact, on our team—who go undercover and try to penetrate radical mosques in this country,” he said. “This is not about being anti-Muslim. It is about being anti-extremism, anti-Jihadism and anti-terrorism.

[Link]

Recent developments in wiretapping cable broadband:

Cable Television Laboratories (CableLabs), the cable industries research and development consortium, has released the specifications needed for the minions of law and order to “wiretap” cable broadband user’s activities on the web.

[Kevin D. Murray: Link]

Whistleblower Declaration and Other Key Documents Released to Public

More documents detailing secret government surveillance of AT&T’s Internet traffic have been released to the public as part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’s) class-action lawsuit against the telecom giant.

Some of the unsealed information was previously made public in redacted form. But after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has filed newly unredacted documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T’s facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers’ emails and other Internet communications. These include several internal AT&T documents that have long been available on media websites, EFF’s legal arguments to the 9th Circuit, and the full declarations of whistleblower Mark Klein and of J. Scott Marcus, the former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission, who bolsters and explains EFF’s evidence.

“This is critical evidence supporting our claim that AT&T is cooperating with the NSA in the illegal dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “This surveillance is under debate in Congress and across the nation, as well as in the courts. The public has a right to see these important documents, the declarations from our witnesses, and our legal arguments, and we are very pleased to release them.”

[EFF]

“You’ve Already Seen Them”

There are no surprises in the AT&T documentation published Tuesday, which consist of a subset of the pages already published by Wired News. They include AT&T wiring diagrams, equipment lists and task orders that appear to show the company tapping into fiber-optic cables at the point where its backbone network connects to other ISPs at a San Francisco switching office. The documents appear to show the company siphoning off the traffic to a room packed with internet-monitoring gear.

Released along with the AT&T documents is a formerly sealed signed declaration from Klein, and a written analysis of the documents penned by internet expert J. Scott Marcus, which have been kept mostly under wraps by a court order that applied to the parties in the case.

The interpretation of Klein’s documents by Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, are the most interesting documents released Tuesday.

“This configuration appears to have the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic,” Marcus wrote.

AT&T likely has 15 to 20 of these rooms around the country, and shipped data out of the rooms via a separate network to another location, Marcus concluded. Collectively, he estimated that the rooms were able to keep tabs on some 10 percent of the nation’s purely domestic internet traffic.

[Wired.com]

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow notes:

In a chilling analysis of the PATRIOT Act, the ACLU points out that the new definition of “domestic terrorist” redefines any US criminal as a terrorist, exempt from due process and an open trial. “Domestic terrorists” can have their assets seized without a hearing, have their educational records pulled, and a host of other nasties. “Terrorism” is now officially meaningless: as far as the PATRIOT Act is concerned, if you do anything the government doesn’t like, you’re a terrorist. When you put it that way, it seems even less likely that we’ll win the “war on terrorism.”

[Cory Doctorow: Boing Boing]